The
Spy of the Century?Accused of mishandling classified material, Taiwan-born Wen-ho Lee is
in jail, shackled and isolated. His family fights on; the scientific community
asks questionsBy RON GLUCKMAN

In a tiny county jail cell in Santa Fe, shackled and isolated, sits the
Spy of the Century: Wen-ho Lee, super-spook who stole the crown jewels
of the Pentagon's nuclear arsenal and endangered world peace by passing
them to China. Or, at least, so he is portrayed by the U.S. government and
much of the American media. In fact Lee, an American citizen and veteran
mechanical engineer, has not been charged with espionage at all, but rather
of mishandling classified material. For months investigators have been trying
to make Taiwan-born Lee confess to spying for Beijing -- in the process
denying him access to newspapers, radio and phone calls to anyone other
than his lawyers and immediate family.

To many, the heavy-handed tactics recall the communist witch-hunts of
the 1950s, only today's red menace is China, not the Soviet Union. This,
perhaps, should come as no surprise. The allegations against Lee emerged
in the wake of the 1999 Cox Report, a controversial document that purports
to show evidence of Chinese espionage going back decades. Moreover, it is
election time in the U.S., and vilifying Beijing is all part of the campaign
fireworks.

Whether or not Lee is a spy, the handling of the case already has had far-reaching
consequences -- worsening fractious U.S.-China relations, angering Asian-Americans
within and without the research establishment and rocking the U.S. justice
system. At issue is what some see as a tainted investigation that targeted
Lee from the outset because of his ethnicity, and seems to have focused
only on evidence that would secure a conviction.

Before his sudden notoriety, Lee had led a quiet existence as a scientist
in Los Alamos, New Mexico, a mountain town born of brilliance. The desolate
stretch of red-rock plateau was secretly settled in 1943 after the Allies
learned that Nazi Germany was working on a new weapon of mass destruction.
America's best brains rushed to produce their own version -- and did so,
exploding the first atomic bomb on Aug. 6, 1945.

Today, the men and women who work at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL)
help map the planet, harness lasers for medical use and plan a host of other
innovations. Only part of LANL's present work relates directly to weapons
research. And, despite machine guns and barbed wire around a building with
enough plutonium to end life on Earth hundreds of times over, almost all
weapons work is now done by computer.

The big challenge at Los Alamos is certifying the readiness of America's
nuclear arsenal. Researchers are assisted by Blue Mountain, the world's
most powerful computer. Even so, equations are so complex they can run for
a full year. And it falls to human minds to devise increasingly innovative
simulation tests.

That's where Wen-ho Lee comes into the picture. A specialist in the field
of fluid dynamics, he devised elaborate computer codes to predict how materials
would change in the face of an enormous force. Like an atomic bomb.

A
Classic Over-Achiever
Lee's is the classic story of the over-achieving immigrant. Born in 1939,
he was one of 10 children of poor farmers from Nantou, a rural area of Taiwan,
near Taichung. Lee's parents died soon after World War II, and he was raised
by relatives. Early on, Lee proved himself a gifted scholar. After earning
a B.Sc. in mechanical engineering from Tainan's National Cheng Kung University
in 1963, he competed hard for a student visa to the U.S. Two years later,
the shy, diminutive 26-year-old arrived in College Station, Texas, to
attend Texas A&M, where he took a masters in 1966 and a doctorate in mechanical
engineering in 1969.

By all accounts, Lee worked just as hard to fit in. He bought a blue Mustang,
the cool car of the time, and practiced American sports lingo, especially
references to football. A trip to California's Rose Bowl with a group of
Taiwan immigrants resulted in a romantic touchdown: Identifying the prettiest
girl in the group, Lee made sure he drove her home last. Five weeks later,
Wen-ho and Sylvia were engaged. After marrying, they moved often, following
Lee's work. A son, Chung, was born in New Jersey in 1972, and a daughter,
Alberta, in San Diego in 1973. Lee became a U.S. citizen in 1974.

This was a nuclear family in every way. After a 1978 research posting at
Los Alamos, Lee was hired at LANL full time in 1980. His wife worked there
for years as a programmer and even the kids spent summers at the facility
-- Alberta mapping data from a nuclear test site, Chung running computer
codes. In quiet, crime- and pollution-free Los Alamos, the Lees established
a tidy household with few concessions to their origins. Chinese was spoken
at home, but the kids joined the scouts, played soccer and studied music.
Alberta describes a sheltered, disciplined, but extremely happy upbringing.
She and her brother grew tall. "I attribute it to father's cooking," jokes
Alberta. Dr. Lee loved to whip up Chinese dishes, using home-grown bok
choy, asparagus and snow peas.

Lee's colleagues and neighbors describe the accused as a loner who seldom
socialized outside his family. Even Don Marshall, who lives next door and
worked with Lee at the lab's top-secret X Division, admits he didn't know
his colleague well. But one thing people knew for sure: Lee was fanatical
about fishing. Everyone on tree-shaded Barcelona Lane in White Rock, a
picturesque suburb of Los Alamos, recalls the same familiar sight -- Lee
returning home with his catch.

Perhaps it is fitting, then, that the world's first view of Lee was that
of a slight, old man in a rumpled fishing hat. That photograph ran in papers
and on television screens around the world in March of 1999. Wen-ho Lee's
ordeal had begun.

Paranoia
And Politics
It all started with a shadowy tip. U.S. authorities claim that in 1995 a
Chinese agent passed on documents detailing Beijing's weapons program. Some
designs so closely mirrored America's own bombs, particularly the W-88
mini-warhead, that a determination was made that the technology must have
been passed to the Chinese. From there, everything moved backward. Rather
than cast a wide net to ferret out clues, investigators chose to match culprits
to the likely time-frame. The data were believed to have been leaked in
the mid-1980s. Suspicion quickly settled on Lee, who made two trips to
Beijing in 1986 and 1988. Lee has acknowledged meeting counterparts in Chinese
weapons research on the trips. That is no secret. He did so with the approval
of his employer. LANL paid for both trips.

The Lee investigation lumbered along for more than three years without producing
any hard evidence of espionage. A turning point came in late 1998. Word
began circulating in the media that Chinese agents had infiltrated the American
security apparatus. About that time, Lee was hauled in for questioning.
The family home was searched in April 1999, whereupon intelligence agents
announced an astonishing find: Lee had allegedly copied 400,000 to 800,000
pages of classified documents -- "the blueprints for the entire American
nuclear arsenal." Agents claimed he had spent hours copying information
from classified to unclassified computer systems, then downloaded the data
to portable tapes, some of which remain unaccounted for.

The Lees quickly learned what it meant to become the property of the police
and press. The family home was staked out. The car was bugged. Lee could
barely go to the toilet unobserved. Agents tailed him on fishing trips.
"The FBI was everywhere and the reporters camped out on the street," says
Eve Spencer, who lived two doors down from the Lees. "It was a total circus."

As the surveillance became increasingly intrusive, Lee began avoiding old
friends, say colleagues, fearing that he would implicate them by association.
When friends dropped by the Lee home, the scientist wouldn't even open the
door. At least once, he used a co-worker's home phone so he could call
relatives without federal agents listening in. The circus ended when Lee
was finally arrested on Dec. 10, 1999, and put in solitary confinement.

Well before that, Lee's daughter Alberta had begged her father to get a
lawyer. "He kept saying: 'I didn't do anything. Why would I need an attorney?'
Dad is such a simple person. Right until the end, he actually thought he
was helping the investigation." Perhaps that's because he and his wife had
done just that in the past.

In the early 1980s, Lee was an FBI informant during an investigation of
a Taiwan-born scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near
San Francisco. For her part, Sylvia helped the FBI keep tabs on visiting
mainland scientists, allowing authorities to monitor her conversations with
them. She also provided the FBI with translated copies of her correspondence
with mainland scientists.

In 1982, Lee himself came under counter-intelligence scrutiny, and once
again soon after. Both times he was cleared. But matters were different
this time. A variety of political and defense considerations meshed with
the same need: produce an arrest. Lee fit the profile. After all, he was
ethnic Chinese.

Coming at a low point in U.S.-China relations, the Lee case became fodder
for hardline Republicans, who accused the White House of being soft on Beijing.
The Clinton administration countered that if a spy had slipped into the
nuclear treasury, it happened in the 1980s, when George Bush and Ronald
Reagan were in the White House. The longer the W-88 investigation ran without
producing a smoking gun, the more embarrassing it got. Damage control became
the overriding concern as numerous agencies launched their own investigations
and the FBI was ordered to start over from scratch. Again, they settled
on Lee as the prime suspect -- even though they could charge him only with
mishandling classified documents.

Upon what evidence it is impossible to ascertain. Beyond testimony presented
in bail hearings, authorities refuse to discuss the case. National security,
they say, using the same rationale to deny Lee visitors, save for meetings
with lawyers, and only an hour a week with immediate family. Until recently,
Lee wasn't even allowed the hourly outdoor breaks enjoyed by most county
inmates. This is due to Special Administrative Measures, rarely applied
restrictions in security cases that override the human rights granted even
to convicted rapists and murderers. "He's being treated like an animal or
worse," says a friend and former colleague. "It makes me ashamed to be an
American."

The case has shaken not only the U.S. research community, but the justice
system as well. Everything about the situation is unusual, from the special
security chambers that will have to be built so Lee and his lawyers can
go over classified material in advance of a November trial to the strange
charges against Lee. He is accused of 59 counts of mishandling classified
material, but the original indictment was under statutes of the Atomic Energy
and Federal Espionage acts, which have never been used to prosecute anyone.

To date, no evidence has been shown that any of the data Lee allegedly copied
was conveyed to a foreign power -- a key facet of a successful espionage
prosecution, according to legal experts. Nor is there any proof that the
data on the W-88, the basis for the original investigation, was ever passed
to China. In fact, the government's own reviews of the case conclude that
it wasn't.

Perhaps most damaging to government credibility is the condemnation by former
intelligence agent Robert Vrooman, who worked on the case from 1995 to 1998.
"There is not one shred of evidence that the information that the intelligence
community identified as having been stolen by the Chinese came from Wen-ho
Lee, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Department of Energy complex or
from a DOE office," says Vrooman, now a security consultant in Los Alamos.
Vrooman told The Washington Post: "This case was screwed up because there
was nothing there. It was built on thin air."

Evidence of lax security is indisputable, however. Case reviews found that
workers in Lee's X Division often stacked piles of classified papers, containing
the same codes he is charged with downloading, in hallways when their offices
became too cluttered. "This entire case arose from a sense that some power
was stealing secrets, but there is no evidence at all that that happened,"
says Lee's attorney, Brian Sun. "After over 1,000 interviews and one of
the most extensive investigations in U.S. history, they have still come
up with zero."

In The
Name Of The Father
"I used to trust the government, but not anymore!" says the woman at the
microphone. "Know your rights. Don't trust the government!" Few workers
heading home from San Francisco's financial district pay heed to the small
gathering in Portsmouth Square. Pigeons roost on park benches, as the suits
slip past panhandling Vietnam vets and a card table manned by socialists
with this banner: Down With Anti-Asian "Spy" Witch-hunt! Afterwards the
speaker, Alberta Lee, meets supporters for snacks and tea at the nearby
Chinese Community Center. It is another fundraiser in late January. "This
has totally turned me around," she says. "A lot of people take for granted
that the government knows what it is doing. I'm scared because I've found
that's not true. And it terrifies me."

Alberta is the main mouthpiece for her father's defense. Locked up and denied
access to the outside world, Lee can't defend himself. Even when Alberta
visits, the two are separated by a glass wall, and a federal agent sits
close by. Until recently, family members were not allowed to converse in
Mandarin. Now, a Chinese-speaking federal agent sits in to ensure that
the security of the world's sole superpower is not compromised by the short,
stilted family reunions.

Alberta has largely put her life as a software worker in North Carolina
on hold. She shuttles around the U.S., making speeches, mustering support.
This seems to be a family decision, as Chung is immersed in the final phase
of medical studies in Cleveland. Sylvia still goes about her daily life
in the Los Alamos home, but she has maintained a strict silence. "We decided
to try and maintain as normal a life as possible," says Alberta. "As normal
as possible when something like this happens," she adds, her voice breaking.
"It's been a nightmare."

Nonetheless, Alberta's efforts are paying off; throughout America she encounters
ethnic Asians who are incensed by what many deem racially motivated allegations
against a U.S. citizen. They are pouring money into the defense fund, mobilizing
politically, and urging ethnic Chinese graduates to boycott U.S. labs. Cecilia
Chang, a Hong Kong-born resident of suburban San Francisco, runs the Wen-ho
Lee Defense Fund from her family home. "After three years and spending so
much money [on the investigation]," she asks, "where are the results? All
we see is that Lee is being made to suffer. It's a complete injustice."

At U.S. national labs, the climate is one of fear and paranoia -- with ethnic
Chinese researchers looking over their shoulders. "They want us to be Americans
and work in their defense labs," says a Taiwan-born scientist. "But they
never treat us as Americans. They always treat us like foreigners, like
Chinese." He and others cite the double standard of John Deutch, an ex-Central
Intelligence Agency director who accessed classified files from an unsecured
home computer -- apparently leaving the nation's secrets vulnerable to hackers
-- and was let off with a slap on the wrist. "Deutch hasn't been reprimanded,"
says one scientist bitterly. "He's not chained up like Wen."

Still, in private, some colleagues, many of them ethnic Chinese, are unwilling
to give Lee unconditional support. They recall strange phone calls with
their friend and curious behavior. "Like all those fishing trips," says
one. "Why was he always going off on his own?" There are rumors that Lee
was unhappy at work, in danger of losing his post and looking for other
opportunities. And there are still questions about Lee's professional behavior.
Already, his 10-person defense team has explained away some of the accusations.
For instance, Lee's computer access code was used extensively to log into
the classified system by remote from Los Angeles. Not a foreign agent, according
to Alberta, who testified that she used her father's secret code to gain
high-speed lines through the lab to an online game she played while in
university.

Other matters are more perplexing. For example, how to explain all the copying
of classified material? Defense lawyers have suggested Lee was only protecting
time-consuming research from computer crashes. Yet colleagues note that
the lab has back-up systems. And despite defense claims that taking work
home is common, dozens of colleagues say no way. Never. "That's the mystifying
thing," one concedes. "I can't think of any reason why anyone would do such
a thing. It's just such a huge breach of security. I'm fully behind Wen-ho
Lee, but I'm baffled, too." He adds: "Still, I'm sure there's a reasonable
explanation. I just want to hear it from Wen." That's what the Lee family,
Los Alamos and all of America is waiting for, too.